In a decade of memoirs about the lifelong misery that is childhood, Sean Wilsey’s Oh The Glory of it All strikes an invigorating chord. On a superficial level, the book offers an epic poor-little-rich-boy story: son of glamorous society family whose glittering world is shattered by divorce, a wicked stepmother, and an imbalanced mother, turns to delinquent behavior, and suffers years of being raised in loco parentis by increasingly sinister boarding schools. Not a bad start. But Glory earns its title in the sharp details of its protagonist’s thwarted humanity. Beneath the helicopters, stolen cars, penthouse apartments, drugs, sex, and inheritance tax, the book is about a kid struggling to find love and meaning in a familial environment that prizes narcissism and self-interest over tenderness and loyalty. You needn’t be rich to find yourself in one of those.
Wilsey will be reading with Alison Bechdel, whose recent graphic memoir, Fun Home, is no picnic either.
Did you have to be convinced that your life was worth turning into a non-fiction book, or had you attempted to transpose it into fiction?
No. I had worked at the New Yorker for a few years and had been really steeped in reading a lot of non-fiction there. I had the idea that the book I wanted to write was something along the lines of Janet Malcolm or Louis Finnegan: a really reported piece that had a personal voice. I thought the boarding schools that I’d been to—particularly the kind of weird reform-style therapeutic schools—could make for a really interesting subject for that kind of book. Especially since I had my own history in those schools. I’ve actually only just gone back and started to clear out my office of all the research materials for the book, just to get it out of my life, and I found the first thing I did, back in the summer of ’98, was to go and interview all these people about their own experiences in those schools. None of that stuff really made it into the book, but the more I ended up researching that stuff, the more I realized I had to bring my own experiences into it, and then I realized that I had to give context to those experiences, and then it just kind of turned into a book. So, I never really thought “Is my life worth turning into a non-fiction book?” I felt really sure that that kind of school was worth turning into a non-fiction book, and then it kind of mushroomed into a memoir.
Do you find that people are unsympathetic to your pain and suffering because your parents were rich and you went to private school?
I’ve never had anyone say “Dude, you didn’t suffer because you didn’t go to public school.” I don’t think anybody thinks private school’s such a great thing. I don’t—I guess I’ve never really asked for people to be sympathetic about it. I don’t feel like the book is particularly a plea for sympathy in any way. And then, I don’t really talk about it very much other than that. I guess, in a weird way it was a source of some embarrassment to me that the book was—justifiably—pretty much universally reviewed as a kind of rich kid’s childhood. Which of course it is, but I never thought of it that way, particularly. I just thought of it as a very bizarre childhood that happened to be mine. So, I don’t feel like my point of view is a rich kid’s point of view, per se. It’s more like the point of view of somebody who happened to be born into that world and kind of felt like, “What the fuck? This world makes no sense. These people behave really terribly.” But really wonderfully, too, in some ways. So, I don’t really want any sympathy for that. And I don’t feel like anybody has particularly withheld it.
I don’t mean that you deserve sympathy because of your privilege, I just mean that your class background sort of disqualifies you from a certain fashionable proletarianism, which might make the harrowing neglect you write about seem to some people like no big deal because, like, your dad had a helicopter.
Yeah, of course. That’s true. And at times I’ve gotten bummed out by that. I feel like everybody that I’m friends with, my group of peers, none of them came from my kind of background at all. I sometimes feel a little embarrassed that I did.
Do you think there’s something intrinsic to the experience of growing up privileged that leads people into identity crisis?
I think there’s a lot less expected of you when you grow up in an atmosphere like the one I grew up in. There’s sort of no impetus for you to achieve anything. Like, what’s your struggle, you know? I think that struggle is what gives people a sense of identity. It’s definitely what gave me a sense of identity. My wife has often said, “What would you have been like if your parents had just stayed together and you’d grown up just like a little prince of San Francisco?” And part of me is like “that would’ve been fine!” I think I’d still have been a good person and I’d be happy to find out. On the other hand, I definitely wouldn’t be the person I am now. I’m a kind of energetic person. I’ve always been ambitious and motivated and I don’t know that I’d be that way if I hadn’t grown up with a certain amount of weird adversity.
A different kind of adversity than people might expect.
Right. But adversity nonetheless. And adversity is good.
Now that the book has been out for a while and you’ve had time to really live with it, is there anything you wish you hadn’t disclosed about yourself or your family?
[Laughs] No, there really isn’t. I did a reading the night before last in Boston with a few other writers as part of LitPac, which is this political action group that raises money for progressive political causes. One of the people in the audience had been a student at St. Mark’s when I was there. There’s a moment at the beginning of the chapter about St. Marks that goes into the history and how I would design the school crest to take into account some of the tragic, shitty things that happened around the time that I was there, one of which was this kid dying the year before I got there. And I had actually only ever heard that story anecdotally, never from anyone who had actually been there, and I was worried that I had maybe fallen for a bit of urban legend. And this woman at the reading said “no, no, it absolutely happened the way you describe it. I remember it really well.” And I was really relieved. Sometimes when you do a lot of research—I spent six years working on the book—things you think you know, you realize maybe you don’t know as well as you thought you did. I haven’t had anything else like that, but that’s the only kind of thing I would worry about—that I had made some kind of error. As far as revealing stuff about myself, no. I feel fine about it. I mean, it’s not like it comes all that much up to the present. There’s a cushion of history between then and now.
It’s interesting to think that you’ve written this memoir of who you were without feeling like you’re revealing too much of who you are. It seems like so much of who we are is formed by what happens to us during the years of childhood your book covers, and your experiences were pretty extraordinary, and you write so powerfully about that sense of impotence, of never being listened to, and of being punished for acting out when you weren’t listened to by being not listened to further… Some people never let go of that period, never get through it. Do you feel like you have, whether through the process of writing the book or some other means?
I mean, of course, it’s still me. I think what’s surprising is how much you reveal about yourself unintentionally sometimes when you’re writing. I feel like it’s a very intentional book. I’m very aware of what I’m doing with it, and I spent a lot of time revising it, and I know it really well. But I’m sure there are some things in there that are still very much who I am, and in ways that I might not even be totally aware of. And I might think I’m totally beyond them, but I’m not. The overriding sense of powerlessness, I don’t feel that anymore, and I haven’t for a long time. That makes it much easier to write about all those times when I did feel that.
You spent a lot of time as a kid plotting your revenge, as many kids do. A lot of writers use their books as occasions for revenge, as well. Yet your book doesn’t feel vengeful—maybe a little, but only inasmuch as you’re telling your version of a story whose telling was controlled by other people. Given the particulars, it seems pretty restrained. Did you wrestle with the impulse to punish the people who had aggrieved you? (Obviously, I’m specifically talking about your stepmother, Dede.)
Well, Dede’s a really particular case, because I’ve never been able to find any redeeming quality in her. I wish I could. And I actually do genuinely wish that things hadn’t happened the way they happened. There were many moments where just a single act of kindness, or something just going a little differently with her, would’ve changed everything. It certainly would’ve changed how I wrote the book. I mean, my love and sympathy for my father is probably overabundant in the book. He probably deserved to get less of an affectionate portrait in a lot of ways, but that’s how I feel, so I don’t know how I could’ve done it any differently. It was really his fault, not Dede’s fault. He’s the one who decided to marry her and kind of look the other way as she cut him off from his family. Anyway, I was pretty harsh on my mom, but I also gave her her due, I think. And then Dede, all I could do with her was write what I experienced, and double check it and triple check it. I mean, I’m sure I did this in earlier drafts, but I really didn’t try to editorialize about her very much. I just kind of let what she did and who she was stand for itself. And there’s a certain amount of editorializing in that, given that what she did wasn’t very fucking nice, to say the least. I’m sure I could’ve looked around for things to mitigate her somewhat, like look how horrible her childhood was, and I’m sure it was. But I’m not sure that was my job. My job was just to portray her as she was with me. She’s got her own point of view. She can write her own memoir. And I really went out of my way to point out what a pain in the ass I was as a teenager. You can really draw your own conclusions as to whose point of view is more valid.
It’s kind of hard to imagine anyone taking her side, though. Unless they know her personally or something. Her attorney, maybe.
Yeah, maybe. But that’s how it was.
Are you at a point now where you’re ready to not be talking about this stuff anymore? I keep reading these interviews with Joan Didion where she says there’s no such thing as closure, but are you close to being done talking about your book, and by extension, the period of your life it chronicles?
I don’t know. I feel like it would be hasty to say that I was. I went through a period where I was talking about it a lot, like during the first six months the book was out, when I got really sick of myself. I developed this really vertiginous feeling that my goal in writing the book, having been to move on, had been completely subverted, that it had done the complete opposite, that it had brought it back even more. But that was an early months feeling. The book has been out for a year and a few months, and I’m happy to talk about it. I’m glad that people are interested in it. I don’t know that I’ll ever revisit any of this material, but I’m happy to talk about it. I used to work myself up into these frenzies, especially about the boarding schools, just trying to explain to people what these places were like! And now I just don’t feel any obligation to do that. The book can do it. Joan Didion is almost certainly right: there is no such thing as closure. There’s just different chapters, and each one just kind of informs and leads to the next one.
